vizLib

Introduction

Libraries are at the heart of our communities, but they are facing challenges from budgetary pressures and changes in modern lifestyles. The Leicestershire County Council (LCC) Research and Information team, Leicestershire Library Services (LLS) and the giCentre at City University London have visually explored 450,000 library lending records to develop answers around three key questions to the service:

How does performance vary across the 54 libraries in Leicestershire?

In which areas are the best customers living?

Can the area you live in contribute to predictions of use?

The key participants were Robert Radburn at LCC and Dr. Jason Dykes of the giCentre at City. Robert participated through a User Fellowship of the ESRC UPTAP programme - a secondary data analysis initiative funded to support those aiming to Understand Population Trends and Processes. The fellowships build capacity in secondary data analysis by ‘up-skilling’ early to mid-career researchers.

The work is indicative of an exploratory approach that might be utilised across a whole range of large structured government data holdings – particularly those that are spatial.

vizLib movies

Sophisticated interactions and animated transitions were developed using the open source software sketchbook Processing and then used to query the lending records in a highly dynamic way. Some of the most interesting patterns that help answer these questions are outlined in the movies below.

There is no audio on these movies.

Spider Plots

Graphics showing the spatial relationships between libraries and customer locations

Neighbourhood to library use

Spatial Treemap

We used the new 'spatial treemap' visualization technique for non-occluding space-filling layouts. Symbols representing geographical units are sized according to population and arranged to reflect their locations and the hierarchical geography of units.